A Bee in a Pot of Honey

"....I want to make beauty, not be drowned in the ready-made, like a bee in a pot of honey."

---Edith Wharton, The Reef (1912)

The next few entries will feature Edith Wharton's The Reef.

Facing It Part III: Concealment

Today's quote is taken from Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in 1929.  The book focuses on the relationship between two light-skinned, racially mixed childhood acquaintances, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry.  Reunited after a number of years, Irene, a New Yorker,  learns that Clare is passing for white in Chicago and has married a racist white man who does not know of her past or her identity. He jokes that Clare is getting "darker and darker" and refers to her by the pet name of "Nig."  Clare lives in fear of being discovered yet keeps taking considerable risks to reunite with the African-American community she left behind.  In this scene, Irene describes the "polite insolence" as well as the mystery conveyed through Clare's unusual features:

"[...] she'd always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat.  Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate.  A tempting mouth.  The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre.  And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes.  Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
     Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes!  mysterious and concealing.  And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic."

--Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)